Layouts
You can maximize the amount of you gain from animals and Fun Stuff by surrounding them with decorations. Each decoration has a 1-cell range bonus (i.e. for an animal family, it would be the closest 20 squares to it -- see "1 row around," below). Decoration bonuses are cumulative, so one palm tree will give 15% bonus, 2 palm trees give 30% bonus, etc. Some decorations give a high bonus, but also have a large "footprint" or size -- they take up a 3x3 or even 4x4 square section; some decorations are only 1 square in size, so you can put many of these decorations in the same space that the bigger decorations take up. So some of the high-bonus decorations may actually not be the best, when you figure what the cumulative bonus would be of 1-square decorations. Currently, the best decoration would be "Rudy," which gives 30% bonus and takes up only 1 square... but it costs 10 . If you have a lot of friends, the best deal would be to buy Palm Trees, because they only cost 10 each, and give 15% bonus -- and save your acorns and coins for other things. The most effective decoration you can get in coins is the Snow Turkey, which produces 12% for 100,000 and also only takes up 1 square. Current maximum village size insIce World98x98. 2 rows around The most common apparoach is to place the animal habitats in a grid, separated by two rows/columns of 1x1 decorations. In this method, if the decoration gives 1% bonus, then each animal would get 52% bonus. 3 rows around This is the most effective, but also the most expensive layout. For first animal you will need 84 decorations with 1x1 size. Initially Mushrooms as they are cheapest per grid square, and then Stag Grass Statues and then replace them with Palms as they give even more bonus. If You can afford, use "Rudy" statues, as they are the best (30% each): *At B put the best decorations you've got, as that affects most animals *At C you may put a single larger decoration (for example UFO in Ice), so that it takes up a 3x3 space in your grid, so that two types of animals will get its full bonus. *At G put whatever is best of remaining decorations (that position still affects 2 animals) *Fill the rest with whatever you can afford Maximum gain of this approach is 84 squares around animal x 30% (Rudy) = 25200% (Not counting possible corner bonuses). Octothorpe This makes the best use of limited space, giving maximum bonus while using minimum decorations. You'll get more total bonus for each item if you use one of the above methods; but if you are conserving your resources (coins, hearts, acorns), or are running out of space, this will be helpful. means "eight fields", and is the technical term for the number sign (#); it comes from the old practice of building a house in the center of some land, and having 8 fields around it. It's very similar to the "3 rows around" layout above, but reversed, so that instead of having an animal surrounded by rows of decorations, you have a center square of decorations surrounded by animals or fun buildings. If you use a decoration that is 1 square, you can of course put 16 in them, and get cumulative bonus for your animals. Unfortunately, most if not all 1-square decorations have an "area of effect" of only 3 squares, so the bottom row of decorations will not touch the animals in the top row, for example. You can also surround each octothorpe with another row (or 2 or 3) of decorations to increase the bonus. You could do something similar on a slightly smaller scale, by using 3x3 fun buildings -- instead of having 4x4 (16) decorations in the center, you could have 3x3 (9) in the center, then surround it with 8 fun buildings. In this instance, all of the buildings will be in the "area of effect" of all of the decorations. Because each section of land that you add to your village is 7x14, you could have regular octothorpes set up along your village, with each octothorpe taking up two land sections (14.x14): make an octothorpe as above (using 3 animals or 4x4 fun buildings) and surround each octothorpe with a perimeter of 1-square decorations, and that fills it up: You can put 4 of these across and 4 down, once you've bought all the land in your village. And of course, when you have odd-shaped fun buildings (bowling alleys are 2x4 and bungee jumps are 3x4), you could improvise by using two bowling alleys together to form a 4x4 square, or line up 4 bungee jumps to make a total of 12 squares on one side. (Or just put them in inventory and don't use them at all.) To continue this theme with 3x3 fun buildings, you could just change the scale, as noted above, or if you want to fill an entire 14x14 section of land, you can make use 4 buildings along each side, plus one in the middle, and fill any empty sections with palm trees or other 1-square decorations. If you do this, you will have a lot of unused decorations in inventory, but I think you will be pleased at how many coins you make from your animals and fun buildings. And of course, if you don't have enough coins or acorns or hearts to buy the decorations you want, you can always fill in with the decorations you already have, and then replace them as you get more resources. Using this layout, and using only palm trees for decorations, each animal (or 4x4 fun building) gets a minimum of 330% bonus, and up to 675%; each 14x14 double-section of land uses 68 palm trees. There is a similar bonus if you use 4 of the 3x3 fun buildings on each side, with one in the middle; this 14x14 section of land uses 79 palm trees. (You can see this layout in my village; my user name is Katsy0283.) More To earn even more coins, put something with a long wait time in the middle of a ton of decorations just before collection time.